The story of a group of four friends going to Vegas for a bachelor’s party. When they wake up the next day, they don’t remember what happened and they can’t find the groom, who is due to his wedding in 24 hours. It’s a male juvenile comedy about immature guys getting in trouble and out of it. It’s theme is an affirmation of the much repeated cliché in the movie, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” In comparison with movies like Wedding Crashers, or Knocked Up, (also gross our comedies) which mock male immature juvenility and affirm taking responsibility, The Hangover celebrates it. Because they were inadvertently slipped Ruffies (the date rape drug that causes memory loss), the guys are not portrayed as being entirely responsible for all the wild, criminal and immoral things they did during the evening. Mike Tyson, the famous boxer criminal, is portrayed as cool, even heroic, especially when he slaps a high five for the guys stealing a cop car. The three friends receive their share of beatings from criminal types, but it is all portrayed as undeserving, since they “didn’t know what they were doing” on the drug. There are jokes of endangering a baby they have to carry along with them. There are ultimately no consequences for their behavior as they get back in time for the wedding, and the groom tells his bride at the ceremony that “as long as we are married, I will never do anything like this to you again.” But the final moment shows the guys looking over pictures they took on a newly discovered camera of their night, all acting as if their orgy of debauchery was just good fun to be hidden in the memory. One of the guys, an uptight emasculated man, engaged to a controlling female monster hypocrite gets up the courage to take charge of his life and break his engagement because of his experience in unwittingly marrying a stripper/prostitute (while on the drug). He then decides to go back to take the prostitute out for dinner, because she is portrayed as more authentic and fun-loving. This movie is not a morality tale about growing up, it is an affirmation of male stereotypes and a celebration of juvenility, immorality and immaturity.
Comedy
The Devil Wears Prada
Comedy. An unfashionable girl gets a job with the Queen of the fashion industry and is educated in the ways of outer beauty. A thoroughly enjoyable moral tale about fashion as a metaphor for life. Anne Hathaway is brilliant as the neophyte thrust in over her head and Meryl Streep is even more brilliant as the Devil herself. What I liked about this story is that it was pretty fair to the fashion industry, even while critiquing it. That is, the moral was of course that you should be yourself and not some fake façade of nouveau, but it gave the devil her due as well. That is, one scene was the most brilliant in the film is where Ann chuckles at the pettiness and apparent irrelvence of the designer’s design choices. Meryl stops and turns it back on her by describing to Anne, the origins and development of the poor taste turquoise blue in the sweater Anne is wearing, all the way up to the point where Anne buys it in a half price bin, thinking she is making her own choice, without being aware that the entire fashion industry dictated her options to her right down to what she is wearing. It was one of those moments where you say the villain is not all that wrong, though she may be an extreme. Favorite line in the movie, Anne questions Meryl about the legitimacy of the fashion world, and Meryl says to her, “Don’t be ridiculous, everyone wants to be us.” There is a particularly poignant punch to that line that hit me about our culture. That is the entire world of advertising/marketing/fashion simply works because everyone DOES want to be the impossible unattainable icon. Fashion is the deity of perfection which we all desire or are drawn to, whether we know it or not.
What I did not like about the movie is that a triangle is set up between Anne and her current boyfriend, a nobody nothing student of some kind, and a writer of the fashion world that is hitting on Anne. Well, the boyfriend is set up as the guy who represents conviction and the world she left but should have stayed with and the fashion writer represents the false world of temptation into emptiness. And yet, I thought the boyfriend as a loser and undesirable non-convictional man. So, I think their moral was not quite incarnate in that character as depicted. Another failing I think is that Anne sleeps with the fashion guy and then leaves him for the boyfriend, as if that liason did not affect her spirit at all. This was dishonest. Something that The Breakup storytellers were more observant about. In the Breakup, they break up but never sleep with anyone else because the storytellers realize that that changes you in a permanent way and alters the hope for true reconciliation. Not that reconciliation is impossible, but surely that the relationship loses the true unity that it had. Sex is sacramental. It changes you and your relationships forever. It takes a piece of you and loses it to another person. To deny that is dishonest.
Little Miss Sunshine
Quirky Comedy. A family of dysfunctional misfits takes a road trip to bring their little daughter to a beauty pageant for children. This was a fascinating story to me with fascinating characters, and a touching theme about the value of family love and acceptance in the midst of imperfection. Alan Arkin as the 60s hippie grandfather who cusses too much, Greg Kinnear as the Success motivational teacher who is a loser, the brother who reads Nietzsche and hates everyone and takes a vow of silence. Steve Carrell as the gay professor of Proust who tried to commit suicide because of unrequited lust. Toni Collette as the mother and a newcomer as Olive, the little girl who appears to be the only sane one in the family.
What I liked about this film was it’s sense of reality, that none of us are perfect and that love and human connection can occur even within messed up families. More importantly, that perhaps the “functionality” of the “normal world” is maybe not so right or even desirable after all. When they all get to the pageant, it’s a circus of Jon Bene Ramses, strutting their little 6-9 year olds around like Miss America, looking way too adult for their age, and being coaxed to be a commodity of commercial success rather than just being little girls and enjoying life and family. If this is normal life, you can keep it. One of the themes is about how each of us is special and important, even with our quirky dysfunction or problems. At the pageant, Olive is about to be totally humiliated when she does her little dance because the family realizes that all the other girls have professional routines and they know Olive just doesn’t match up to them. So, when Olive starts to be rejected at her dance, the whole family joins her on stage dancing like fools to diffuse and even absorb her rejection. It’s really quite a moving moment of unity within this motley crew called family, and shows their concern for her more than the other parents who have culled their little girls to be things of entertainment.
What I did not like about it is that the dance that Olive had learned was from her grandfather, who was a dirty old man. So Olive does a strip dance. Okay, she has a sequined little outfit underneath, so it is not a pedophile thing, but the point is that it is a truly immoral thing and NOT a worthy thing to support in the little girl. This element sullied the moral of family support. We simply should not support such impropriety in little girls, it will destroy them if we do. Also, another scene tries to create a moment of family unity, when the father, who is obsessed with being a winner and not a loser, challenges Olive not to eat her ice cream because it makes people fat and fat people are losers, or more precisely, the Miss Americas that she idolizes do not eat ice cream, so if she wants to become a winner like them, then she shouldn’t. The other family members mock and deride the dad as insensitive and they all take a spoonful of ice cream to get her to take some as well. Later, the little girl asks a Miss America if she likes ice cream and she says, yes! The point here is that I think the filmmakers intended this to be a moral statement about the obsessive preoccupation with health as destructive on children’s psyches. But I have a completely different moral compass that says that the epidemic of obesity in children today – and it is an epidemic – is caused precisely by this politically correct rejection of guilt and elevation of the impulses. After all, it’s what all addicts do to each other, comfort each other in their problem. The father was actually right and was in the better interest of the child. She was already chubby, which indicated that she was already eating TOO MUCH CRAP (read: SUGAR). So, yes, commodification of women is wrong, but so is psychobabble about making children feel good and giving them whatever they want instead of teaching them discipline and giving them what they need.
Last Holiday
Romantic Comedy. Queen Latifah, a retail clerk, discovers she has 3 weeks to live, so she quits her job, gets all her money and blows it on a rich experience in a beautiful hotel across the world. But while doing that, she affects the lives of the rich around her because a person who is acutely aware of their mortality tends to care more about the things that are worth caring about: life, people, little pleasures, and the beauty all around us. Her new appreciation of life draws others around her like lost disciples who want to know her secret. This was a very wonderful story that really made me think about my own life and about appreciating life more and stopping to smell the roses before it’s too late. And it even had a positive Christian spiritual side to it, as Latifah prays to God, or really, more like Job, complains to God throughout the film. Her honest struggle with God made it that much more rich in spiritual appreciation.
Thank You For Smoking
Black comedy. This was a very clever cutting piece about the nature of manipulation of truth on behalf of agenda. And you know, I didn’t take it as being just about the politically correct cause of anti-smoking. I think it extends far beyond that. The main character, played brilliantly by Aaron Eckhart is a lobbyist for big tobacco, and he goes around unashamedly defending smoking, based on freedom of conscience. He gets the idea to help big tobacco by placement in Hollywood movies and there is a wonderful sequence about the insanity of Hollywood types as they do anything for money.
Unfortunately, I saw this movie very late and I was very tired, so I fell asleep during the most important part, the congressional hearings, so I’ll have to see it on video and complete this blog sometime later. But suffice it to say that there was some brilliant stuff in there about spinning. He tells his son, “that’s the great thing about logic. If you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.” Well, this is profoundly true and why so many people can be so irrational while upholding rationality. It’s all in the premises. If you start with the right premises, you can win any argument. This is why “framing the argument” is so important in winning debates, and why the media is so manipulative, because they in fact do this very thing, which is symbolically portrayed in Aaron falling in lust with a news reporter who uses him to get a good story, and then when he questions her, she responds, what do you think I would do? I’m a reporter.
You know, as much as I agree with the idea in this film that smoking is bad for you and people who support it are just rationalizing, I could not help but think of the hypocrisy that comes with this moralizing. You see, the point of this film is that marketing smoking as cool in movies and media is morally responsible for the smoking that results because people, especially kids, imitate. AND YET, these very same people DENY that marketing irresponsible sexuality and violence as cool in movies and media IS NOT morally responsible for the sexuality and violence that results because people, especially kids, imitate. So kids are destroying one another’s innocence and murdering each other, and these people are concerned with how evil smoking is?
Thumbsucker
Quirky comedy. A teen kid struggles to overcome his insecurities around his family, friends and schoolmates that is exemplified in his leftover habit from childhood of thumbsucking. This movie breaks the traditional story structure rules and focuses a bit more on character than story, but is ultimately a very interesting tale that left me thinking about it for days. The main point of the story is incarnate in the “mentor” character of the kid’s dental surgeon, played ironically by Keanu Reeves. The kid tries all these different ways to stop his habit, from hypnotism, to taking drugs for ADD, which is one of the funniest and profound elements of the story. The kid realizes that the drugs are just another fake solution to our human condition, which is really an indictment against the medical model of psychiatry that dominates our culture.
But the story goes farther than this. After the kid has tried all these means of stopping his habit, and has not been able to do so, the dentist meets with him again and tells him his previous theory was all wrong and apologizes for it. He then concludes with a monologue expressing the theme of the film that we really don’t have the answers to the human condition and each of our theories and attempts are just our confused way of wandering through life trying to find our way. Although this is ultimately existentialism in its cynical view of truth and rejection of solutions to the human condition, there is a big grain of truth in it that connects with me. While I believe that there is absolute truth, I don’t think that as humans, we have absolute or certain knowledge of it outside of faith. And even having a connection to God doesn’t guarantee absolute or certain experience of victory over our problems. Our understanding of God is often wrong in so many different ways as well. This doesn’t mean truth is undiscoverable or that we should not seek to find answers, but merely that we need to be more cautious in our pursuits of claiming certainty and have a willingness to consider the remote possibility that, yes, we might actually not have it all right.
The Matador
Buddy Black Comedy. An aging assassin who is losing his touch befriends an everyman nice guy and both their lives are changed for the better.
This is a rather funny comedy that uses a Matador’s eloquent noble killing of a bull as a metaphor for facing death and murdering people with style. There are some great and funny moments of Greg Kinnear as the consummate everyman good guy and his shock at getting to befriend this cold hearted killer. As well as humorous moments of the Assassin, played brilliantly by Pierce Brosnan, as he tries to rediscover normal human life through this everyman.
However, I would have to say that the story fails in a couple ways. First, it doesn’t really explore the themes that are most embedded in such a premise. It doesn’t show the effect in Kinnear’s life of facing death and becoming more of a man of action and decision in light of the brevity of life. The story focuses on the encounters with these men, but not really the life effects on Kinnear. Also, the movie merely shows the hitman losing his nerves and being unable to kill anymore, but it does not explore the interior reasons for this in the killer. It does not show or tell us what could have been a wonderfully profound depiction of the effect of being a person who takes innocent life. At best it shows him as lonely on his birthday, because after all, who wants to be the friend of a killer? But he never tells Kinnear anything about this. A beautiful opportunity to transform Kinnear into a confessor is totally missed.
The morality of the movie is also deeply flawed. Basically, you have a hero, Kinnear, who befriends a man who should be turned in to the Feds, but he doesn’t. And there is no pressing reason that forces him NOT to. There is a wonderful moral moment, when we begin to realize that Greg may have hired the hitman to kill his business competition, and we become repulsed by him, but then we realize that he asked for it, but the hitman wouldn’t do it because he knew it would rack him with guilt for the rest of his life and he would regret it. So Kinnear learns his lesson without going all the way. Very cool. And by the way, this may be the scene where the storytellers were trying to show us the negative effect on the killer of his killing, but I don’t think it was clear enough. This could have been the confessor scene where we see the killer’s explanation of why he won’t do it more as a confession of his own misery in doing so. But instead it seemed to me to be portrayed more like the killer was more mature and able to handle it, but Kinnear was not, so the killer is like an older brother protecting the everyman, but not with his own regret.
Anyway, after that moral triumph, Kinnear then ruins his entire integrity by helping the assassin to kill his last target in order to get out of the business safely. This makes him a very unsympathetic hero to me. We find out that the target was actually the guy who was trying to kill the assassin, but it is too late, because the hero did not know that, so he did it, thinking he was killing an innocent man, which makes his character unredeemed and stained with evil. And I believe the storytellers knew this to be the case because they did not show a crucial dramatic moment of Kinnear helping him to actually kill the target. So, alas, the moral structure of this film was rather repulsive, though the ironic humor of the moments was brilliant.
Fun with Dick and Jane
Satire Comedy. A Jim Carrey vehicle about a married couple pressured to pursue the American Dream of keeping up with the Joneses, who turn to robbery when they both lose their jobs and face losing all they own. This is a “stick it to the Man” story about the corrupt greedy exploitation of the working man by Enron-like companies. Alec Baldwin does a great job playing himself as the heartless head of the greedy company who bails out of a collapsing hollow shell corporation with a golden parachute of millions, while all the company workers lose their pensions and lifelong savings. When Carrey and his wife, played by Tea Leoni, realize they should steal Baldwin’s money, not the innocent people around them, they plot a paper switch at a bank that would take his money and end up giving it back to the pensions of the jilted workers of the big company. So a Robin Hood movie. This is a complex issue in this story, because on the one hand, I do agree that the corporate exploitation of the little man is clearly a problem in our society, but on the other hand, I don’t think it is justifiable to break the law to “do good.” And that is exactly what the hero and heroine do in this story. Even though they turn from stealing from their neighbors, they do still end up stealing from another neighbor, he’s just a corrupt one. I do not like stories that try to get you to cheer on the hero if he is trying to accomplish a crime. They tend to reinforce vigilanteism even in non-violent forms. Trying to achieve justice while breaking the law is itself unjust. But one of the reasons why this did not bother me as much with this story as it did with others like Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve, is because it is a satire that seems more focused on the bad guy getting his comeuppance than on the hero’s own story. Of course, this doesn’t justify it as right, but it did make it less offensive. At the end the heros do not get the money, they give it to others, so it is less about them winning and more about the villain losing. Perhaps this is the powerful draw of Robin Hood mythology – it justifies crime by appealing to the pragmatic result of good. Evil is okay if it results in good. Pragmatic morality is the handmaiden of evil.
Sky High
Recommended. This is a live action version of The Incredibles, and I loved it. And it is an example of my inner tension over comic book super heros. On the one hand, Movies like the X-Men franchise seem to be secular god substitutes in being myth carriers like the Greek and Roman pantheons, which causes a nagging dislike for them. On the other hand, movies like Sky High seem to use “super powers” more as a strict metaphor for the specialness or uniqueness of the individual and their contribution to society. Same artistic approach used for different worldviews. At least that’s how I see it. And I’m willing to admit this may be a subjective thing. I think the fact that the typical comic book movie tries to be “realistic” in taking itself more seriously, while Sky High is more tongue in cheek comedic analogy. Maybe that’s what makes it feel different to me. Anyway, the theme of Sky High is about Winners and Losers, the juvenile categorization of high school society. There is a one to one correspondance between how “sidekicks” and “heros” are treated with the winners and losers or the cool and the nerds in high school. The fact that each of the side kicks end up using their “minor” powers to help save the day is an obvious analogy to how each and every person is special and can contribute value to the community. It is very reminiscient of the biblical notion of the Body of Christ. There are some uncomely body parts and some more comely, but ALL are important to the health of the body. There is also a subtle anti-technology theme running in there that is another reflection of The Incredibles. That is, the villain is a technopath that can arrange technology with her mind, while the corresponding love interest for the hero boy is a girl with the powers of nature. She can call forth nature. And both are vying for the hero’s affection. This is much like the villain in The Incredibles who mimics superpowers with technology because he is jealous that he does not have any naturally. So technology here is a tendency toward destruction of our humanity.
Wedding Crashers
Hard to Recommend. This is a story of two sleaze balls, played perfectly by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, who crash weddings in order to sleep with women. They are cynical divorce attorneys who do not believe in love or marriage, only selfish gratification and using women for their pleasure. This story is their redemption and how they discover true love, which is defined in the film as “A soul’s recognition of it’s counterpoint in another.” Okay, that’s good. These two selfish men, the worst of our kind, use every trick in the book to manipulate women, and then they discover true love which saves them from their selfishness. Well, a bit Romantic, and I’ don’t mean love romance, but the worldview of Romanticism. But a pretty good moral to the story. The problem is that it is very crass in getting to that moral. Obviously riddled with a lot of sex gags, and unfortunately, entirely inappropriate cussing throughout. What I liked was seeing Vince Vaughn’s character, getting his comeuppance in the form of his own fantasies so to speak. Well, the problem with this formula is always that it portrays human romance as the ultimate meaning to life. And as much as I would heartily believe in true love with my wife, it just can’t save us.